She stared down at it. My father stopped rubbing his hands.
“I don’t understand,” my mother said.
“What’s to understand?” I asked her.
“Well, what is this?” she asked.
“It’s eighty-seven hundred dollars, Mom. Surely that must ring a little bell.”
She glanced up at my father. He gazed off over her head, suddenly abstracted.
“But … is it yours?” she asked me. “Where did you get it? And in cash! Walking the streets of Baltimore with all this cash! How would you have come by such a large amount, I’d like to know?”
“No trouble at all,” I told her. “Though it did make kind of a mess when the dye pack exploded.”
“Seriously, Barnaby. Have you been up to something you shouldn’t?”
Odd that it hadn’t occurred to me she would jump to this conclusion. I made a snorting sound. I said, “Don’t worry. It’s legal. I sold the Corvette to Len Parrish.”
“You sold the Corvette?” my father asked, suddenly coming to. “Son,” he said. “Was that wise?”
I wasn’t going to argue about it. I told Mom, “Feel free to count the money yourself, if you like. Make sure I didn’t shortchange you.”
For a moment, I thought she would do it. She picked up the bills in a gingerly way and turned them over. But then she said, “That’s all right.”
When they gave me the wad of cash at the bank it had seemed so bulky, but now I was struck by its slimness. For all these years, that money had loomed between us. I recalled Mom’s hints and reproaches, her can’t-afford-this, can’t-afford-that, her self-assured air of entitlement as she inquired into my finances. I recalled my old daydream that she would cancel the debt when I married, or after my first child was born. And yet it made such an unimpressive little package! Granted, it was a lot of money — a lot for me, at least — but you’d think I could have come up with it before now.
I said, “Well, then. Are we fair and square? Everything settled?”
“I suppose,” my mother said faintly.
Somehow there should have been more to this. More excitement, more relief; I don’t know. I stood up. I said, “Well! Guess I’ll be going.”
My mother went on sitting there. It was Dad who walked me to the door.
For a month after Mrs. Glynn accused me, I had nothing to do with her. Sophia didn’t, either (she was never going to speak to her again, she said), but I heard a little about her from Ray Oakley. He was the one who was going there in my place. He said she had cut her hours back to one a week, and even then he hardly saw her. “I try and steer clear of her,” he told me. “I’m worried she’ll say I stole something too.”
Me, I had pretty much let her fade from my mind. Sophia thought that was incredibly charitable of me, but it was more that I just figured things always evened out, sooner or later. Look at it this way: I might have done time in jail if I hadn’t had rich parents. And even rich parents couldn’t have helped if anyone had discovered I stole a Buick convertible the night of my sixteenth birthday. So when Mrs. Glynn said I did something I didn’t, there was a certain justice to it.
Even losing my Corvette: a certain balance, you might say.
I was still in possession of Sophia’s little porcelain slipper. I brought it back one evening and put it among some doodads on her mantel, where it didn’t belong, so she would think she had simply misplaced it if she’d noticed it was missing. I didn’t believe she had noticed, though. I felt artful and deft and catlike as I set the slipper soundlessly between a brass clock and a hobnail vase. I slid my hands in my jeans pockets and walked away whistling.
It wasn’t entirely undeserved, Mrs. Glynn’s accusing me.
Then one Friday afternoon toward the end of September, she telephoned. “Barnaby Gaitlin?” she said — pert little old-lady voice. But I knew so many old ladies, I couldn’t think who she was. I said, “Yes?” in a guarded tone. When they called me direct, it was usually with a complaint.
“This is Grace Glynn.”
I got very alert.
“Sophia’s aunt,” she reminded me.
“Yes,” I said.
“How are you?” she asked me.
“Fine.”
“Doing well?”
I waited to see what she was after.
“I was wondering,” she said, after a pause. “Would you be so kind as to come to my house this evening?”
“Your house.”
“Just for a little chat,” she said. “It won’t take long.”
I said, “I guess I’ll pass on that, Mrs. Glynn. Thanks anyhow.”
“Please? Pretty please?”
“Sorry,” I said, and I hung up.
There were limits to how charitable I was willing to be.
When the phone rang again, a few minutes later, I let the machine answer for me. But this time it was Sophia. “Barnaby, I wanted to ask if—”
I picked up the receiver. “Hi,” I said. “I’m screening my calls. You’ll never guess who from.”
“Aunt Grace,” Sophia told me.
“Oh. You knew she was calling?”
“She called me too. I just now got off the phone with her.”
“What’s she trying to pull?” I asked.
“She didn’t say, but I guess we’ll find out tonight.”
“We will?”
“I told her we’d stop by.”
“I’m not stopping by,” I said.
“Oh, Barnaby. Please?”
She had a different voice from her aunt’s — steadier and much lower — but the upward note at the end was the same. “I think she wants to apologize,” she said.
“She didn’t tell me she wanted to apologize.”
“Well, why else would she ask us over?”
“Maybe to have me arrested,” I said.
“Don’t be silly. How she put it was, she wanted to ‘chat.’ She said, ‘I know you’re very cross with me, but please, please, the two of you, come for a chat.’ ”
“She’s got some kind of ambush planned,” I said. “SWAT team lying in wait for me behind her potted palm.”
Sophia laughed, but dutifully, as if her thoughts were elsewhere. “How could I turn her down?” she asked. “So I said yes.”
“You can’t say yes on my behalf, Sophia. You had no business doing that.”
“Well, but, sweetie. She’s my aunt!”
I kept quiet a moment. Not to sound paranoid, but it crossed my mind that Sophia might be in on this, whatever it was. I knew she was too honorable for that, but even so, I had a little flash of doubt. Meanwhile, some other phone line seemed to be mixing in with ours — tiny distant voices I couldn’t quite decipher, a woman burbling away and another woman laughing. The two of them were so lighthearted. I felt as if we’d plugged into not just another conversation but another time, simpler and more innocent; and here I was in this muddy, confused life of mine.
I told Sophia, “All right, hon. For your sake.”
She said, “Oh, thank you! Thank you, Barnaby.”
“But we’re only staying a minute,” I said.
“Of course.”
“Just long enough to be polite, so things aren’t awkward with your relatives.”
“I understand.”
Hanging up, I felt like a phony. Face it: I couldn’t care less how things stood with her relatives. Underneath, my fantasy was that Mrs. Glynn really would apologize. And while she was at it, why couldn’t all the others too? The Amberlys and the Royces, and Mr. McLeod with his Chinese statue. I pictured them lining up in Mrs. Glynn’s parlor to say … what? Not that they’d wrongly accused me; that was too much to hope for. But maybe, oh, that they’d overreacted, or failed to allow for extenuating circumstances. Or that they still liked me anyhow. I don’t know.